My Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book

Quietly went by a snow-covered billboard alongside a highway in Pennsylvania.

There Are Heroes Among Us

Sirens screamed and blood was coughed into oxygen mask so violently paramedics jumped back in the time of Ebola outbreaks and no health insurance for some Americans.

In a blink of an eye, I relived life as the lights on the ceilings of Lincoln Hospital became bright as the lights on a cell phone shown to me by Mark Wilson, a New York Post reporter, who was investigating UFOs around the building my mother lives in.

I walked light-years in my ocean deep sleep to remember dreams against nightmares.

I made peace with The God Who Said Vengeance Is His.

In a blink of an eye, I recalled a bright light in front of my bedroom window when I was a child gifted with photographic memory that can be a curse.

Bright UFOs made the cover of the newspaper founded by a Founding Father.

There is proof of aliens everywhere on Earth

One alien is called Poverty

I woke up to the sight of clothes, furniture and toys thrown out of windows like a scene from a movie on Nazis evicting Jews from Germany.

My disabled mother whispered someone was banging on the door.

 Leave your belongings behind. I’m giving you and your mother bunk beds, said a rep from Paradise Management. He wanted us to move into another apartment on the other side of the building where the new landlords were trying to get two elderly long time female residents to move to yet another side of the building. It was confusing and more so due to serious head injuries by the fists of a Neo Nazi in a dorm room at NYU.

US Marshals would evict by force newer tenants that didn’t move out within a short time frame. Our side of the building became silent with vacancies. Machine gun sounds of power tools rattled nerves from morning to afternoon. They worked on apartments when ours needed work. Our hallway was filled with building materials and nails on floor that became dangerous for my mother. At night, it was a ghost town of sawdust.

It went on for weeks.

I learned the building was to become a pit stop for homeless families to be moved into renovated apartment units rented at thousands of dollars apiece with New York City paying a part of it. My disabled mother is a regular tenant who moved in with her husband in the beginning of The Watergate Scandal.

Paradise Management treated us like the homeless families given bunk beds.

I saw a baby crib and a big bag of toys left behind in a small apartment we were being harassed to move in to avoid being taken to court for failure to renew our lease. I was told not to worry about the crib and other belongings because it was going into the garbage.

 I was told to raise a letter to appear in Housing Court for the building manager to take a picture to email to his lawyer to render null and void after the new lease was signed. I was told there would be no need to appear in Housing Court.

If we had signed that lease, we still had to appear in Housing Court. Failure to appear meant police would have arrested my disabled mother and I.  Paradise Management had several Dominicans ready to move our belongings into a smaller apartment on a higher floor bad for my mother’s legs. 

Paradise Management on behalf of the new landlord, Corner View LLC pressured us by fear of eviction. They wanted us to sign a new lease that would had made us new tenants subject to new rules and regulations.

When I wasn’t home to protect my mother, she almost signed a lease to another apartment in the presence of tall breaded men dressed in black and the short building manager who translated from English into Spanish the promise of 500 dollars if she signed on the spot.

They were playing Three Card Monte with apartments and herded us like white mice in a maze in a building where the rat population increased due to the unsanitary behavior of some of the troubled people moved out of homeless shelters.

I sent a notarized letter to Corner View LLC for an installment of a security system in the building that has been vandalized several times and scenes of violence, drug use and graffiti on walls like toxic mold. Our mailbox was mutilated as if M-80s blew it up.

It happened two days after Paradise Management employees entered our apartment without permission and tried to get me to call off a city inspection. A city inspector was in the next room and heard everything. He warned them he would call police if they interfered with an investigation. They left in sullen silence. It’s scary to hear some of them tell me they are my friends. I must look as stupid as Columbo, a TV cop.

Two days later, I complained to a superintendent about the mailbox but he did nothing but smirk.  A friend gave me a cellphone to take pictures to show to The Longwood Police Stationhouse where I filed a report.

I took the unsigned lease to Housing Court where a gray haired female legal clerk compared it to the old one, which is rent stabilized. Sweetheart, don’t let your mommy sign. I want you to go to The Department Of Housing and tell them what is happening in your building, she said, genuinely concerned.

Dazed by a blazing sun, I walked the highway for hours to prevent homelessness.

I walked in a heat wave for hours to tell this story to city officials.

I submit this journal to the future of history from The South Bronx where my fifth grade English teacher, Mr. Marks, gave me the letters of a little girl named Anne Frank.  I carried her in my childhood through the shadows of burnt out buildings and bullies of The South Bronx where my mother and others were practically doused in gasoline by a previous landlord. Within a short time after the purchase of the building, Italian-Americans splashed highly flammable liquids on our rooftop.

Someone saw something. Someone said something. If not for the timely intervention of Blue Angels, the building would have been quite possibly another Happy Land---several blocks away from where we live--- where dozens of lives were burned alive.   

I wish the policewoman would had told me it was also a Federal matter because of the loss of our mail. Our mail was also scattered in an office to handle the mail of the formerly homeless. I was told not to come back because we were not part of the program.

I petitioned a mail carrier to go get our mail from that office.

The superintendent came up to me with keys to another apartment’s mailbox. They offered $500 to get us to move.

Hell came in the form of Paradise Management.

They had succeeded in concentrating some long time residents to one side of the building. The holdouts were three elderly women, my mother being one of them by my counsel.

One senior citizen of them labored to get her lease renewed after she turned down a sizable cash incentive. They kept calling her to move out to the point of her refusal to answer the phone, she told me. She said they were driving her crazy. One of the residents who had signed a new lease had to go to court a year later to get a renewal lease. I had to call Corner View several times to get rent receipts. I had to finally pay the post office to run a trace on the money order/rent money. They issued a replacement check that I sent to the landlord. As I write this, it has been two weeks of asking for the receipt from last month. The new superintendent tells me it’s coming in everyday. Some time back, an employee, who was in charge of recycling garbage, saw my mother in the courtyard. When are you moving out, he barked in Spanish. He was the one who told my mother if she wanted anything fixed in her apartment she would had to pay him in cash.

Then my mother broke her arm when she slipped on a pipe left behind by workmen ordered by city inspector to fix our bathroom from water damage due to the faucets left on in an apartment upstairs that was vacant. My clothes in the closet was soaked and stained and the superintendent was nowhere to be found. They left junk behind instead of taking it to the garbage. I held my mother’s hand on the ambulance. Without an apartment renewal lease, how can one apply for healthcare?

It was the worse of times

In the last century, a Bronx County Courthouse gave me a lecture on the importance of being beneficial to society. He said The South Bronx needed lawyers to protect the rights of the elderly and children. He was encouraging a pathway to the law.

The next best thing is to be a mild mannered reporter.

To be continued

My Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book

Artwork and journal copyrighted by Daniel Angel Aponte

MRI of my brain by New York Radiology

2017